A syndicate affiliated porn site operated a year-long scam in which it swindled over ¥200 million (some $2.2 million), all by simply telling people they owed the site thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.

After investigations by anti-organized crime units, a 41-year-old man, who claims “I don’t know nothing at all!”, along with 4 other suspects, were arrested in Arakawa-ku, Tokyo, on charges of fraud conducted.

All the crimes were conducted via payments in connection with the scamming porn site: from April of 2007, to February of 2008, an estimated sum of ¥200,800,000 was stolen.

Upon investigation, it was discovered the main suspect had contacted a 40-year-old office worker residing in Yamanashi prefecture via his cellphone and delivered the following ultimatum:

“I believe you used our adult web site on December 24th of 2007, and your late fees have accrued to a total of ¥328,000. If you do not pay the late fees by today you will owe a total of ¥600,000!”

The deceived victim then paid the ¥328,000 without question.

This swindle was carried out numerous times with the aid of an acquaintance of the suspect, an adult web site owner, who provided the telephone numbers of customers using the site.

Due to his affiliation with a local crime syndicate, police are currently investigating the possibility that the suspect was also paying a portion of the stolen money to the government.

There’s a short story by Roald Dahl, “The Bookseller”, which is quite similar to this newspiece.
The titular bookseller owns a small bookshop, and keeps an eye on newspapers for obituaries. When he finds out someone famous has died, he sends a letter to the widow which basically says “Sorry to bother you after such a painful loss, but your husband owed us some money for some erotic literature we sold him. Forward the money to us, or else we’ll go to court.”
The widow, not wanting to mar the memory of her late husband, pays up.

A very plausible scam. One of the biggest problems porn sites face are with canceled or disputed payments from credit card holders. Not many people like to fess up they paid for porn. I’m sure many people gave into the scam out of sheer embarrassment.

Seriously, they could have at least checked to see if they even remembered going to the site. If it was a real site. But, hey, if you fall for it, it’s kinda your fault.
That WAS pretty smart of them though.

So they just told them “you owe us money” and they paid up? I don’t understand how these people fall for this. Don’t you pay with credit card to access these sites? Is just calling someones house enough to scare them?

They’re using the guilty consciousness of the victims
if the victim never visit any porn site he can easily say “f*** off”
then again, I believe there’s just 0.001% human in this world who never surfing any porn sites so the method is effective

This swindle was carried out numerous times with the aid of an acquaintance of the suspect, an adult web site owner, who provided the telephone numbers of customers using the site.

I’d say the amount of people not watching porn while visiting a porn site and even filling in their phone number equals the amount of people of blind people visiting the site.

And @ SaruDa
There is plenty of opensource goodness.. I’ll list you the good ones. In order of my own preference

FirefoxChromeOperaSafari If you use internet explorer this whole reply is useless as you obviously don’t know anything about what good software is.
#1 is fully opensource, #2 and #4 are based on Konquerors OSS rendering engine.

Other fine examples are OpenOffice that isn’t really worse then Microsoft Office.. some things are better, some are worse and The Gimp. Okay so the Gimp is worse then photoshop, it’s still feature rich enough for a lot of people and as it’s free I’d rather not spend quite a bit of cash. (Need to pay random people calling me and asking for porn fee’s)